An embodiment of the invention is directed to digital image processing by a system having a processor and memory.
In digital image processing, natural scenes and artificially created ones (such as those created by computer graphics systems) are represented by digital images. An image includes a collection of picture elements (pixels) each of which is a set of numbers that may represent the intensity and/or color of a particular location on a display screen. A typical digital image may have upwards of one million pixels. To display an image, each pixel is translated into control signals that are then applied to activate a corresponding location of a display screen. In the case of video, a sequence of images or frames are rapidly processed and displayed sequentially at a high enough rate (e.g., greater than 20 frames per second) to show motion in the scene.
A typical hardware/software platform for digital image processing may be a personal computer, or other electronic system, that has the following primary hardware components: a central processing unit (CPU) or host processor, such as a PENTIUM processor by Intel Corp., Santa Clara, Calif.; a graphics controller, such as one that is integrated within and is a display adapter component of a system chipset (e.g., the 865G chipset by Intel Corp.); and main memory (also referred to as system memory) composed of for example dynamic random access memory (DRAM). The graphics controller is a specialized integrated circuit that performs various types of compute-intensive digital image processing upon image data.
The software may be loaded into main memory once the system has been booted, to be executed by the host processor. This software may include an application program such as digital video disc (DVD) player software, an operating system program, and a device driver that is used by the application program for accessing hardware registers of the graphics controller. Once the hardware has been configured by the operating system and driver, the application program can execute.
Systems such as desktop and notebook computers are being put to task with current digital image processing applications such as motion picture experts group (MPEG) video file creation and playback. Such software applications place relatively high demands on the processor and memory, due to their use of complex video encoding and decoding algorithms upon high-resolution images. This often results in relatively slow performance. A reduction in the total amount of time needed to create the compressed video file can be obtained, by running the same software on a system whose processor has a higher clock frequency.